Pin Curls

           Pin curls she called them.  I was 2 generations behind to understand what she meant, but she was wearing them the first time I met her.  Her blue eyes sparkled when she saw me.  I intrigued her.  She wanted to like me but I stood in line behind other girls she had met in similar circumstances who had inspired disappointment in one way or another. 

Night had long since fallen when I stepped onto the screened-in front porch and knocked on her front door.  It was warm for the last night of December, and I only wore a thin leather jacket more appropriate for the beginning of spring rather than the beginning of winter.  The front porch overlooked the C&D Canal, and the glow of the channel lights bounced off the water that slipped under the crescent bridge towering above it.  I stared at the silent serenity until my New Year’s date answered the door and greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.  He grabbed my hand and turned to introduce me to his grandmother. 

                She greeted me in her pin curls with warmth and kindness, sitting in her maroon recliner that was situated in the corner of her poorly lit living room. Her chair faced a dated television set atop a cart.  Doilies covered everything from the sofa to the end tables.  Every inch of the living room was covered by a piece of furniture and opaque shades and heavy drapes kept nosy neighbors from seeing anything through the windows.  Despite the clutter, the room was clean and inviting in a homey sort of way.  I sat down on the chair seated to her left.  She was eager to speak and apologized for meeting me in her pin curls.  The bobby pins that held together twisted pieces of dark blonde hair were a mass of confusion atop her head.  They made no sense to my understanding of style or my own attempts at beauty.  An explanation would have served better than an apology.

                My date sat across from us on the blue love seat that matched the chair I sat in.  He smiled at me as I genuinely listened to her chatter about the latest Lifetime movie she had watched that afternoon and the one she was watching now.  She offered me a mint from a tin of Altoids next to her on the end table.  I declined and commented on the stack of Danielle Steele novels underneath the tin.  She loved to read she said.  She was silent for a brief moment as she sucked on a mint and the noise of Lifetime television filled the room.  The lull in the conversation wasn’t long, though.

 Her chatter was incessant but inviting, and I barely responded with 10 words in the 15 minutes she talked to me.  This was her house she told me.  It had been in her late husband’s family since before the turn of the century.  She and her husband had retired here 30 years ago.  He had been a Keebler salesman, and this had required him to move several times.  She also worked at various jobs as a secretary or a switchboard operator.  Being a switchboard operator kept her privy to all the bosses’ secrets, especially affairs with other women.  Her grandson lived with her, now, to help her maintain the house and keep up with the bills.  She also used to be a softball pitcher in high school.  Fast pitch, she explained.   When I told her we had that in common, I crossed the threshold into her good graces and she clapped her hands as she smiled.

                My date took this opportunity to leave and gently pulled me up from the chair and held my hand as he explained to his grandmother that we had a New Year’s Eve party to get to.  She understood and took my other hand to say good bye and wish me a happy new year.  I did likewise and noticed how soft her hand felt in mine.  I smiled at all of the doilies as we made our way to the front door.  They seemed to define her somehow, and the room itself oddly gave me a sense of home, though I’d never been there before.   

                It was 3 years later when my new year’s date became my husband and that room did become home as did Nana.  I only knew her for the last 7 years of her life, but her doilies often engulf my thoughts and play with my laughter.   As for her pin curls, well, there’s a little Altoid’s tin that sits in the drawer of my vanity.  Whenever a bobby pin came out from hiding in a crevice between the carpet and the wall or jarred itself loose from somewhere deep inside the floor board heaters, it found its way into that tin.  Though the tin is now full and in our new house there will be no bobby pins to find, little hands find their way into the Altoid’s tin in mommy’s vanity and Nana’s pin curls have found another generation to befuddle. 

Footprints

             

           

                My eyebrows rose at the sight of the powdery substance that covered the hardwood floor in my bedroom.  Small footprints marched back and forth through the substance.  Knowing the culprit would not be hard to find, I bent down on my hands and knees for a closer inspection.  Although the powder was light, it wasn’t white enough to be the baby powder I imprudently kept under the bathroom sink.   Sitting back on my knees, I ran my finger across the substance.  Between my thumb and forefinger, the residue felt soft and light.  I sniffed it.  It smelled familiar, but I was still baffled.  Looking at the substance again with my nose to the floor, a glint under the bed caught my eye.   I scooted myself under the bed and reached for the object that reflected the light coming in from the window.  It was a silver top.  Next to it laid an open, empty container.  My intrigue turned to anger.  I pulled myself out from under the bed dragging with me the silver top and the empty container of my $50.00 powdered make up. 

                I yelled out for my son.  A moment later, when I heard the nimble steps of his running feet, my anger subsided.  He appeared at the doorway and stopped.  He hugged the molding around the door and his big, brown eyes bore sheepishly into mine. 

                “Why is mommy’s make up all over the floor in her room?” I asked.

                He let go of the molding once he heard the gentler tone in my voice.  He shrugged, putting his brown, suntanned hands out at his side.  “I needed to see my footprints.” I stared at him for a few seconds, biting my tongue to fetter my laughter.   In the awkwardness of my silence, he added, “That’s all.”  He shrugged again.

                One vacuum, one mop, one bucket of Murphy’s Oil soap, and one leave-mom’s-stuff-alone lecture later, the silence of naptime finally filled the house.  I climbed the attic stairs to dig out one of my favorite classics, deciding to spend these few precious hours to myself ensconced in a novel rather than moving mountains of laundry.   I trekked over and around bins of baby clothes and came to the middle of the attic that sacred ground that holds my bookshelf of novels, poems, short stories and textbooks.

                My fingers skimmed over the worn bindings on the bookshelf.   It had been years since I read Chopin’s The Awakening for the third time, and I was ready to read it a fourth.  I came to the last book on the bottom shelf and it wasn’t there.  I was sure I didn’t miss it.  Standing up, my eyes scanned the books again.  It was not on the shelf.  I turned to the boxes stacked and strewn across the attic floor.  Although the majority of these boxes once enclosed large amounts of diapers and advertised Pampers on the outside, they now contained the relics of my professional and educational life.   

 I decided to dig through my relics.  I started by lugging The Complete Works of Shakespeare off the top of the box closest to me, and I came across notebooks of college lecture notes.  The notebooks were stuffed with old exams and papers I had written.  I pulled one out entitled “Mind Games: The Power of Suggestion in Othello.”  I smiled, remembering the paper and how much I enjoyed picking apart the villain, Iago, and comparing him to the parrot with the same name in the Disney film Aladdin.  I gingerly pushed the paper back into the notebook and placed it back in the box.  Confident that The Awakening was not in there, I pushed the box aside and moved to the next one. 

                I pulled the books out of the box one at time, and set them beside me.  I was determined now to find the one I was looking for.  When the box was empty, I paused and stared at the stacks of literature books piled neatly on the floor.  They stared back and each one begged to be opened and examined.  “Look, look inside me,” they yelled.  “See how the descriptive verbs can create symbolism and imagery and build on a theme!”

I stood up to release myself from my psychotic literary stupor and sneezed from the dust I had kicked up.  On the downward side of the sneeze I saw the last unit I taught before I went out on maternity leave.  It was bound in a three-ring binder on the floor, not in a box.  On the side was written Of Mice and Men.  I knew the novel itself was tucked in the inside pocket of the binder where I left it.   I knew the last lesson plan of the unit was not bound in the rings but tucked behind the novel in the pocket.  I knew scrawled in purple pen across the front page of that last lesson plan was the name Jessica because I wanted to remember the only student I had ever had who openly shed tears in class over a novel. 

The kindled desire to once again immerse myself into the facets of the written word hung before me like a crystal chandelier that pulls at the eye upon entering a two-story foyer.  The search for my favorite classic became a need.  Frantically, I dug through another box, tossing the contents onto the attic floor until the box was empty.  I didn’t waste time with the next one. I dumped it out on the floor, then the one underneath it and the one behind it.  Panting and sweating, I sat down in the middle of the sea of papers and notebooks, textbooks and novels.  Then, I saw one box still unturned.  I grabbed the side and it began to tip.  There on top sat The Awakening.   I snatched the sliding book off the top and let the box turn over, dumping its contents in with the rest.

                The front cover was bent and ripped at the binding.  The pages curled from the humidity that roasted the attic.  Some pages were dog eared at the top and bottom.  As I flipped through the book, passages underlined with purple pen and comments in the margins whispered to me.  On the last page, sentences were underlined with purple lines and surrounded by shouts of exclamation points.  I read them aloud, “She thought of Leonce and the children.  They were a part of her life. But they need not thought that they could possess her, body and soul.”  And then underlined further down on the page, “Good-by –because, I love you.”    

                Rereading the words, I mused over my first reaction to this sentence.  Edna Pontellier was a hero.  She transcended and defied the laws of a male dominated world.  I loved her character when I was single and at the end of my college career. I was ready to embrace her strength.   Reading those words again, though, I questioned whether Kate Chopin’s heroine, Edna Pontellier, had any strength at all.  Is it strength that leads a woman to say goodbye, or is it strength that leads a woman to stay?  When she marries and has children, doesn’t she ask to be possessed by the family for whom she loves and cares?  

 In the midst of my thoughts, I noticed I was surrounded by remnants of a life I once possessed on my own, and I recognized a lost piece of myself.  I wasn’t sure where or when I had lost it. Did I misplace it, or was it taken and now in the possession of someone else?  A million emotions circled through me and I didn’t know which one to pick.  Was I angry or just melancholy?  Amused or content?  Regretful?

Hearing heavy footsteps on the stairs, I turned around to the attic steps.   I saw my husband clad in dirt and work boots surveying the current state of the attic floor.

                “Babe, what are you doing?” His eyebrows peaked in his confusion.  

                I stared up at him, unsure how to answer. A silence lingered between our eyes until my lips parted in a smile and I told him,   “I needed to see my footprints.”